The Golden Bough A study of magic and religion

Page: 181

Knots and locks may serve to avert not only wizards and wolves
but death itself. When they brought a woman to the stake at St.
Andrews in 1572 to burn her alive for a witch, they found on her a
white cloth like a collar, with strings and many knots on the
strings. They took it from her, sorely against her will, for she
seemed to think that she could not die in the fire, if only the
cloth with the knotted strings was on her. When it was taken away,
she said, “Now I have no hope of myself.” In many parts
of England it is thought that a person cannot die so long as any
locks are locked or bolts shot in the house. It is therefore a very
common practice to undo all locks and bolts when the sufferer is
plainly near his end, in order that his agony may not be unduly
prolonged. For example, in the year 1863, at Taunton, a child lay
sick of scarlatina and death seemed inevitable. “A jury of
matrons was, as it were, empanelled, and to prevent the child
‘dying hard’ all the doors in the house, all the
drawers, all the boxes, all the cupboards were thrown wide open,
the keys taken out, and the body of the child placed under a beam,
whereby a sure, certain, and easy passage into eternity could be
secured.” Strange to say, the child declined to avail itself
of the facilities for dying so obligingly placed at its disposal by
the sagacity and experience of the British matrons of Taunton; it
preferred to live rather than give up the ghost just then.

The rule which prescribes that at certain magical and religious
ceremonies the hair should hang loose and the feet should be bare
is probably based on the same fear of trammelling and impeding the
action in hand, whatever it may be, by the presence of any knot or
constriction, whether on the head or on the feet of the performer.
A similar power to bind and hamper spiritual as well as bodily
activities is ascribed by some people to rings. Thus in the island
of Carpathus people never button the clothes they put upon a dead
body and they are careful to remove all rings from it; “for
the spirit, they say, can even be detained in the little finger,
and cannot rest.” Here it is plain that even if the soul is
not definitely supposed to issue at death from the finger-tips, yet
the ring is conceived to exercise a certain constrictive influence
which detains and imprisons the immortal spirit in spite of its
efforts to escape from the tabernacle of clay; in short the ring,
like the knot, acts as a spiritual fetter. This may have been the
reason of an ancient Greek maxim, attributed to Pythagoras, which
forbade people to wear rings. Nobody might enter the ancient
Arcadian sanctuary of the Mistress at Lycosura with a ring on his
or her finger. Persons who consulted the oracle of Faunus had to be
chaste, to eat no flesh, and to wear no rings.